narad
Progressive metal and politics
Maybe it's been a bit quiet on my front lately... wound up really feeling the need to get a strat and went down that rabbit hole into 3 strats, only 1 of which has been functional. Until today!
My main desire right now is the right OG Valley Arts strat, but I've also learned a whole lot about the 70s/80s Schecters, which have a similar story and vibe, but for a long time I just didn't look at because Schecter became such a trashy company for so long. I didn't realize this was where Tom Anderson got his start, and where Suhr would order parts from while at Rudy's. They used some killer woods, and while years ago a dark strat with a brass pickguard wasn't really my thing, and Mark Knopfler definitely isn't either, these wound up growing on me.
So some months ago I bought this at auction, from very shit photos:
With old Schecters, it's hard to tell what you're actually getting. We thought this was a Van Nuys era Schecter, which is the original guys, made in California, but it turned out not to be. The pickguard was the biggest giveaway -- the Japanese Schecter stuff that was done by ex-Schecter importers and PGM/Moon are typically not actual brass, but brass plated. Fast forward 30 years and there's not much plating left. The neck was just plain maple so it's not really the dream machine vibe of having exotic woods.
The good news though, was that the pickups seemed to be actual old MonsterTone and sounded great either way, and the body turned out to be 1-piece koa with some sick figuring on the back and sides. I mean, even the USA ones rarely have koa this nice, and a 1-piece koa strat body these days is just rare as hell. But it just seemed pretty dry? When I see the nicer dream machines, they look like they have more of a semi-gloss. So I started down the path of doing an amateur oil finish on the body...
I went first with linseed oil, which I would glob on, and seemed to never really soak up. FYI, the way this typically works is you apply the oil, it soaks into the wood, and you wipe off the excess, and then let it cure. After a week of that with no real progress, I got some danish oil, which is a mixture of things, typically linseed and varnish, and should soak better. So I put that one, went downstairs, came back about an hour to wipe it off, and ugh... it had turned to tar! I tried to wipe it off with paper towel, but it just glued little pieces of paper towel all over the top of the body! So now I had basically ruined the finish, and looked for solutions. It was recommended that I use turpentine to take the finish off and get rid of the stickiness. I did that, but I was back at square one, or worse.
After another week to kind of let that settle (in case it had to) I started again, and things started to get better:
But I don't have a nice workshop or anything, as you can see this is my kitchen table (also we've been eating on the floor/couch for a month now). Sometime little specs of dust would come and land in the finish. I would sometimes try to dab these out with my finger as the oil cures, but I was feeling inventive one day so I grabbed the can of compressed air, before spraying it onto the body, and launching a million little dusties from inside the cavity all over the body. It wa sseriously 30 times worse. But the surprising thing is that as the finish cures, it does seem to have a way of pushing these things towards the surface. I always seemed to feel it was a pretty clean surface after a light dusting after each cure phase.
So I probably did about 8-10 cycles of this, waiting 2-3 days in between. In the end, I may have even gone over what I had in mind -- it's almost a gloss finish, and it feels hard and protective. Interestingly the sound the body makes as I knock on it changed as I added layers of finish.
There are 2 things I would do differently. One, at the start of this, one of the strap pins was loose. It's not anymore, which seems to indicate that the finish hardened around the pin. I didn't think of oil finishes as being that hard or building up on the surface, so I didn't remove the bridge or these pins. The pins were useful in standing it up, which is how I had it curing in the path of the room heater. The bridge was just laziness... so many screws. The jack was left on too. I should have taken these off, but that's probably obvious. The other thing is that as the finish got glossy, the figuring really popped, but so did the little grain holes. I've seen other people sand between coats. I didn't do this. Supposedly if you sand as you apply the oil, you are creating a sort of slurry of wood particles and oil, and it'll get into those crevices and the finish will dry flatter. That seemed interesting but the danish oil in dry rooms dries really fast and I have no time to multitask. I may at some point try to sand and buff this final finish.
So that's one thing done. Now I had a neck problem, because the existing neck was basic, and then I used it to learn how to remove frets, so it wasn't even useable. Luckily I had a nice maple neck with some figuring from a Japanese luthier, Kid's, that I was planning on using this whole time spent oiling, but it turns out it needs new holes drilled. So I was out of luck, until weirdly, a friend sent me a listing on Tokyo craigslist, written in English, of a rosewood warmoth neck. Wow, what a perfect find, and the price was great too! The guy lives a couple hours outside Tokyo though an dwouldn't ship it, but happened to be passing by my neighborhood this week, so I was able to meet up in person and grab it.
Then finally, I needed to get rid of these plated parts. For dream machine people, these pickguards and pickups are super collectable and expensive and basically not obtainable, but fortunately this site is run by a guy who pretty obsessively creates replacements:
The quality of the polished brass is very high, and Haussel winds the pickups. Haussel also winds for Huber and some other luthiers, I've had the pickups before and thought they were very high quality. 5 weeks later from Germany arrived:
As well as this, I bought some gold tuners and brass jackplate. Note that this replaces the 5-way with 3 toggles which are split/off/full. The pickups are reproductions of the old f500t/400t, stacked singles, one of the first to be splittable.
Putting it all together we have some sort of dream machine:
Really classy vibe. Soundwise, it's very interesting. Tone wood skeptics be damned, but I had a rosewood neck Hartung many years ago, and I thought that had a rather unique sound. This has the same sort of vibe. I would describe the attack as a bit soft, with more of a pronounced fundamental frequency. Even on the split tones there's a bit more body than I expect. The pickups are really clear, and a little polite sounding. I was able to get an actual Van Nuys dream machine this past month, with Bartolini HBs in it, and that is just this raw raunchy sound with a ton of low mids and just really unique and ballsy. This is almost the opposite, though I would also say not having a ton of brightness to the sound.
Anyway it's been fun. My kitchen table can now return to food duties. My only real complaints are that the neck feels a little weird for reasons I can't pinpoint. The overall finish and feel of the neck is great, but it almost feels like it's taller than it should be. I've never gotten that impression -- the neck's not thick or anything, but the fretboard just feels like it's a little further than I expect. But yea, minor complaints. Ah, and the holes on the pickup don't line up to the existing ones in all but a few places. Will probably have to ask ESP to help with that one.
On the next string change I'll probably swap the tuners and jackplate to the gold/brass ones, and probably order a brass neckplate and trem cavity cover. I think the contrast between the now dark wood and the brass is really nice.
My main desire right now is the right OG Valley Arts strat, but I've also learned a whole lot about the 70s/80s Schecters, which have a similar story and vibe, but for a long time I just didn't look at because Schecter became such a trashy company for so long. I didn't realize this was where Tom Anderson got his start, and where Suhr would order parts from while at Rudy's. They used some killer woods, and while years ago a dark strat with a brass pickguard wasn't really my thing, and Mark Knopfler definitely isn't either, these wound up growing on me.
So some months ago I bought this at auction, from very shit photos:
With old Schecters, it's hard to tell what you're actually getting. We thought this was a Van Nuys era Schecter, which is the original guys, made in California, but it turned out not to be. The pickguard was the biggest giveaway -- the Japanese Schecter stuff that was done by ex-Schecter importers and PGM/Moon are typically not actual brass, but brass plated. Fast forward 30 years and there's not much plating left. The neck was just plain maple so it's not really the dream machine vibe of having exotic woods.
The good news though, was that the pickups seemed to be actual old MonsterTone and sounded great either way, and the body turned out to be 1-piece koa with some sick figuring on the back and sides. I mean, even the USA ones rarely have koa this nice, and a 1-piece koa strat body these days is just rare as hell. But it just seemed pretty dry? When I see the nicer dream machines, they look like they have more of a semi-gloss. So I started down the path of doing an amateur oil finish on the body...
I went first with linseed oil, which I would glob on, and seemed to never really soak up. FYI, the way this typically works is you apply the oil, it soaks into the wood, and you wipe off the excess, and then let it cure. After a week of that with no real progress, I got some danish oil, which is a mixture of things, typically linseed and varnish, and should soak better. So I put that one, went downstairs, came back about an hour to wipe it off, and ugh... it had turned to tar! I tried to wipe it off with paper towel, but it just glued little pieces of paper towel all over the top of the body! So now I had basically ruined the finish, and looked for solutions. It was recommended that I use turpentine to take the finish off and get rid of the stickiness. I did that, but I was back at square one, or worse.
After another week to kind of let that settle (in case it had to) I started again, and things started to get better:
But I don't have a nice workshop or anything, as you can see this is my kitchen table (also we've been eating on the floor/couch for a month now). Sometime little specs of dust would come and land in the finish. I would sometimes try to dab these out with my finger as the oil cures, but I was feeling inventive one day so I grabbed the can of compressed air, before spraying it onto the body, and launching a million little dusties from inside the cavity all over the body. It wa sseriously 30 times worse. But the surprising thing is that as the finish cures, it does seem to have a way of pushing these things towards the surface. I always seemed to feel it was a pretty clean surface after a light dusting after each cure phase.
So I probably did about 8-10 cycles of this, waiting 2-3 days in between. In the end, I may have even gone over what I had in mind -- it's almost a gloss finish, and it feels hard and protective. Interestingly the sound the body makes as I knock on it changed as I added layers of finish.
There are 2 things I would do differently. One, at the start of this, one of the strap pins was loose. It's not anymore, which seems to indicate that the finish hardened around the pin. I didn't think of oil finishes as being that hard or building up on the surface, so I didn't remove the bridge or these pins. The pins were useful in standing it up, which is how I had it curing in the path of the room heater. The bridge was just laziness... so many screws. The jack was left on too. I should have taken these off, but that's probably obvious. The other thing is that as the finish got glossy, the figuring really popped, but so did the little grain holes. I've seen other people sand between coats. I didn't do this. Supposedly if you sand as you apply the oil, you are creating a sort of slurry of wood particles and oil, and it'll get into those crevices and the finish will dry flatter. That seemed interesting but the danish oil in dry rooms dries really fast and I have no time to multitask. I may at some point try to sand and buff this final finish.
So that's one thing done. Now I had a neck problem, because the existing neck was basic, and then I used it to learn how to remove frets, so it wasn't even useable. Luckily I had a nice maple neck with some figuring from a Japanese luthier, Kid's, that I was planning on using this whole time spent oiling, but it turns out it needs new holes drilled. So I was out of luck, until weirdly, a friend sent me a listing on Tokyo craigslist, written in English, of a rosewood warmoth neck. Wow, what a perfect find, and the price was great too! The guy lives a couple hours outside Tokyo though an dwouldn't ship it, but happened to be passing by my neighborhood this week, so I was able to meet up in person and grab it.
Then finally, I needed to get rid of these plated parts. For dream machine people, these pickguards and pickups are super collectable and expensive and basically not obtainable, but fortunately this site is run by a guy who pretty obsessively creates replacements:
Mark Knopfler Guitar Website
About the Mark Knopfler Dire Straits guitar style, guitars, sound, licks, gear, music, theory, tutorials, playing
www.mk-guitar.com
The quality of the polished brass is very high, and Haussel winds the pickups. Haussel also winds for Huber and some other luthiers, I've had the pickups before and thought they were very high quality. 5 weeks later from Germany arrived:
As well as this, I bought some gold tuners and brass jackplate. Note that this replaces the 5-way with 3 toggles which are split/off/full. The pickups are reproductions of the old f500t/400t, stacked singles, one of the first to be splittable.
Putting it all together we have some sort of dream machine:
Really classy vibe. Soundwise, it's very interesting. Tone wood skeptics be damned, but I had a rosewood neck Hartung many years ago, and I thought that had a rather unique sound. This has the same sort of vibe. I would describe the attack as a bit soft, with more of a pronounced fundamental frequency. Even on the split tones there's a bit more body than I expect. The pickups are really clear, and a little polite sounding. I was able to get an actual Van Nuys dream machine this past month, with Bartolini HBs in it, and that is just this raw raunchy sound with a ton of low mids and just really unique and ballsy. This is almost the opposite, though I would also say not having a ton of brightness to the sound.
Anyway it's been fun. My kitchen table can now return to food duties. My only real complaints are that the neck feels a little weird for reasons I can't pinpoint. The overall finish and feel of the neck is great, but it almost feels like it's taller than it should be. I've never gotten that impression -- the neck's not thick or anything, but the fretboard just feels like it's a little further than I expect. But yea, minor complaints. Ah, and the holes on the pickup don't line up to the existing ones in all but a few places. Will probably have to ask ESP to help with that one.
On the next string change I'll probably swap the tuners and jackplate to the gold/brass ones, and probably order a brass neckplate and trem cavity cover. I think the contrast between the now dark wood and the brass is really nice.
